


A Leap of Faith

by Lafayette1777



Category: Saturday Night Live, Saturday Night Live RPF
Genre: Established Relationship, M/M, but not really cause they're in denial, cause its a rather different version of that episode, i guess this is kind of alternative universe, kind of a love triangle but its mainly chost, mulaney is caught in the middle and is predictably unprepared for such drama, remember to drink your angst juice kids, season 44 episode 14, why am i here
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-06
Updated: 2019-05-06
Packaged: 2020-02-27 01:03:10
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,562
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18728515
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lafayette1777/pseuds/Lafayette1777
Summary: Mulaney is hosting, Colin and Michael are falling apart, and Pete is watching the whole thing a little too closely.





	A Leap of Faith

**Author's Note:**

> well friends. here we are again. i would like first of all to thank the anon who gave me the idea a few months back to do a colin/che/pete thing with mulaney on the side and this is sort of that, so thanks dude!!
> 
> i would also like to point out that i managed to get into the Sandler show this weekend and therefore witnessed a chost hug with my own two eyes during the goodbyes. transcendent. i feel blessed.
> 
> on an unrelated note, for those of you who have not seen the short-lived sitcom "Mulaney" i recommend watching it if you're in the mood for something extremely cursed
> 
> does anyone want this fic but me? probably not. but here it is. 
> 
> the usual disclaimer: christ almighty keep me and this away from anyone remotely associated with snl. let me rot in peace.
> 
> thanks for reading friends, love yall 3000 xx

Pete does not bother to look across the bar until he hears the glass shatter; by then, most of the action is already over. He gets a glimpse of the crowd staggering backward, of Colin and Che staring each other down while the air seethes between them. There’s a moment where it looks like something is going to happen. Something real. But then Michael is stepping over his broken glass and marching toward the door and not looking back, not even a little, even though Colin watches him long after the door has slammed behind him.

“Whoa, did you see that?” Beck says. 

“Colin totally took a swing at him,” Kyle adds, materializing beside him.

“Really?” asks Pete, turning to face the two of them. They look almost serious, but it’s never easy to tell with them, particularly when they’re together.

“Yeah,” Beck says. “Not much of a punch though. Che stepped right out of the way.”

“Lost his drink though,” says Kyle, nodding solemnly at the broken tumbler now being swept into a corner.

“Have they been fighting?” Beck is asking, but Pete tunes him out as his eyes roam the room. Colin is no longer near the pile of broken glass, nor does he seem to have slipped into the mass of revelers still partaking in the afterparty. He’s disappeared as quickly and wholly as Che, and abruptly Pete feels as though something has begun to shift, something impossibly far out of his control, and that maybe the tailspin is just beginning. They must have one hell of a week ahead of them if this is how it’s going to start.

He takes out his phone and texts Mulaney just one thing:

_Get ready._

 

 

Colin shuffles into the studio on Monday morning with the intention of dipping, unseen, into his office but he doesn’t it make it even halfway there before a room full of eyes fall on him. Word of the fight, if it can so be called, has clearly spread even amongst the cast who did not witness it themselves. He nods to Aidy and Cecily, who are both fixing him with silent, inquisitive stares, and makes a beeline for his office.

It’s Pete who follows him.

“Are you and Che good now?” Pete asks, shutting the door behind him and collapsing his lanky frame onto the couch. Colin frowns at his desk.

“It wasn’t a big deal.” Of course, it was. For a moment. But then on Sunday afternoon Colin showed up on Che’s doorstep, a tumult of apologies falling from his mouth, and they’d fucked away the afternoon and not talked about the fight at all, or what spurred it. And Michael had kissed him goodbye this morning before they’d left separately for work and, really, maybe there’s nothing to talk about after all.

“No one’s told Lorne,” Pete says, scrutinizing him.

“Thanks.”

He wants Pete gone, wants the room empty, wants to fade from existence for what brief moments he can manage before the pitch meeting throws the week into high gear. But Pete is looking at him, still, and he feels he owes him something, because Pete’s keeping a secret for him. The whole situation is being kept under wraps—that Colin and Michael have been sleeping together, on and off, for months. Pretending it’s so unremarkable as to be not worth revealing to anyone else. 

It’s then that John Mulaney appears in the doorway, and the air in the room loses some of its thickness. Pete flies into his arms while Colin heaves himself to his feet for a hug. 

“You guys got some good stuff for me this week?” John asks, grinning at the both of them.

“What?” asks Colin. “We thought you were writing this episode. We were just gonna sit back and enjoy the show for once.”

Before Mulaney can quip back, Pete is dragging him off and launching into some story that Colin is glad he doesn’t have to cringe at. John throws a smirk over his shoulder before disappearing down the hall. Colin turns back toward the empty office, and lets out his first exhausted sigh of the week.

 

 

Che is embarrassed enough on a daily basis that he’s managed to fall in love with a guy who owns a class ring. There are a number of things that are a little bit ridiculous about his affair with Colin, and to make things worse, after the Saturday night incident in the bar it now seems that half the cast is vaguely aware that there’s something going between the two of them. The remnants of the aborted fight are still swimming through the gossip vine, even if it’s unlikely anyone has guessed the source of their anger with each other, for that split second where it wasn’t joke; where there was no veil of a camera, of the show, to intercede. For a moment, as the night faded into the morning and the bar receded into the background, they had just been Michael and Colin, looking at each other with expectation and not finding what they wanted to see. 

It was that one taboo subject that had come up again—the idea. The sitcom idea that Che has been cooking for a year. The pilot script written and interest gathering among Lorne and various other NBC execs. The pieces ready to fall into place, if they’re ready to take the leap. Che is aware that he doesn’t need Colin to do this with him—he’s perfectly capable of setting out on his own, separating himself from the brand they’ve created on Update. But the fact of the matter is, of course, that he doesn’t want to do this by himself when another option exists. He’s starting to lose track of what comedy, what life, looks like without Colin at his side, and this transformation interests him, at the very least. He wants to see where this all ends up, for better or for worse. 

He’d said some version of all this on Saturday night, once the alcohol had begun to permeate him. And he’d said it all a little more vehemently, with less of a smile, than ever before. There was no mistaking it for a joke, a hypothetical, a far off possibility. He’d fixed Colin with a hard stare and willed him to understand.

Colin had scowled and shook his head and said what he always does. _I can’t leave SNL. Not now. Look at what happened to Mulaney—he came back from that but I don’t know if I could. If_ we _could._

 _It wouldn’t be like Mulaney_ , Michael replied, already aware that this conversation was not going the way it was supposed to.

 _You don’t know that._ Colin was shaking his head again, lips a firm line, cheeks flushed from liquor. _There are so many factors that can fuck shows up before they even get made. Why can’t we just stay where we are? Don’t you think this is enough?_

Che had narrowed his eyes at him for one long moment. Then he’d leaned in close, close enough to smell Colin’s familiar cologne, and said quietly, _You’re a fucking coward._

In truth, he had not expected Colin to react quite so physically. He had stepped easily out of the radius of Colin’s fist, watched it arc in slow motion with a detached surprise. In the split second after, the anger in Jost’s eyes had faded into something like revulsion at himself almost immediately. But Che had not wanted apologies—not then, at least. He’d let Colin come to him the next day, and only in the warm quiet of a Sunday in bed had he accepted Colin’s regret. And the sitcom had not come up again.

On Monday morning, he approaches a writers room already filled with the hum of conversation. A game of fuck, marry, kill is in progress. 

“Okay, Leslie, I have one for you,” says Bowen. “Alex, Mikey, Colin.”

Leslie, without looking up from her phone, says, “Do all three to Colin and I’m good with anything for the rest.”

“That’s a solid answer,” Che says from behind her, and she turns in her chair to eye him suspiciously.

“I thought I saw y’all two get a little heated on Saturday night,” she says, looking him up and down. Michael does his best to school his face into something appropriately situated between amused and impassive. 

“And I saw Goody Proctor dancing with the devil,” says Colin, appearing across the room with a bagel balanced on his laptop. 

Kate immediately breaks into a smirk. “Wow, Colin, was that a literary reference?”

Aidy joins in. “Yeah, Colin, did you, like, go to college or something?”

Colin’s face splits into a shit-eating grin. “Actually, I don’t know if you guys know this, but I went to this place called Harv—”

Immediately a litany of laughs and boos are unleashed and two couch pillows, a miscellaneous Emmy, and a handful skittles are aimed at Colin’s head, most of which he manages to duck. Che crosses the room and plucks a skittle from his hair to eat, and Colin fixes him with a long look. For a moment, Michael’s thoughts recede from the drama of Saturday night, and collect happily in the present alone.

 

 

John Mulaney spends the first hour of writing night watching Pete messily eat a pastrami sandwich while a basketball game blares on the TV in the background. By midnight, they’re halfway through a draft of a new Chad sketch when Michael Che appears in the doorway, asking whether they want to do another Update movie review this week. 

John looks to Pete and receives only a shrug in response. “We’ll see.”

“Well, we’re heading out for the night,” Che replies, then flinches at his mistake. “ _I’m_ heading out, that is.”

“Right.” Pete smirks at him. “You know if I were you on Saturday night, I would’ve hit him back.”

Che gives him only an unimpressed look. “Yeah, well, you’re white.”

“Fair enough,” says Pete, and then Che is trotting off toward the elevators, and John can hear just the edge of Colin’s voice from somewhere in that direction.

“What the hell was that about?” John asks, once they’re alone again.

Pete smiles coyly at him and leans back in his desk chair. “I shouldn’t say. I’m supposed to be keeping it a secret.”

“Yeah, cause you’re known for your excellent secret keeping skills,” John says. “A real master of fucking discretion.”

It’s possible that John is still a little salty that Pete blurted out his brilliant idea for Anna’s anniversary present at a brunch the three of them were having two weeks ago, though really no one can say for sure.

Pete snorts out a laugh. “Oh my god, I’ve said sorry like ten times.”

“It’s fine,” John deadpans, and Pete laughs harder. John motions vaguely toward the direction Che had departed in. “So they’re a thing?”

Pete smiles slyly, giving only an ambiguous bob of his head as answer.

“And how do you feel about that?” John asks, narrowing his eyes. He certainly doesn’t claim to be an expert on subtext, but there’s something in the way he’s seen Pete look at Colin, in the way he follows Colin around the office, sometimes. Something alive. 

“Me?” Pete freezes. “Why would I care?”

Mulaney shrugs, watching him carefully. “You and Colin are close, right? Some kind of creepy Staten Island solidarity.”

Pete blinks at him, then quickly averts his eyes. “Yeah, I guess. Not close like that, though.” He rummages around the remains of his sandwich, then balls up the wrapper with an abrupt crunch of paper and aluminum foil. “Not like them.”

“Right, of course.” Now that he’s started this conversation, John is aware that he doesn’t actually know where to take it. There’s something a friend should be doing here, he thinks vaguely, but can’t imagine what exactly it is. 

Pete clears his throat. “So...Chad’s watching TV with his dick out, yeah?”

John focuses his eyes back on the blinking cursor in front of him, the half-finished sketch beckoning. “Um. Yep.”

 

 

On the train, Colin slips briefly into a coma, but when he comes out of it he has a cold open idea and has to search desperately through his bag for paper to write it down with before it escapes back into the ether. Michael watches him with amusement, silent as the train bounds noisily downtown. 

“Better be a good one, because you’re embarrassing me,” Che says finally, watching him scribble furiously on the back of a receipt. 

“Devotion to my job is embarrassing?” Colin says, lifting an eyebrow.

“No, but walking around with a pen behind you ear is.” Che leans his head back against the window with faux exasperation. “Who do you think you are.”

Colin breaks out in a laugh, putting the finishing touches on his impromptu sketch notes, and then turns to look at Che full on. Michael’s gaze slides back over to him, eyes tired but warm.

“What are you looking at?” he asks.

“You,” says Colin, and then smiles with a degree of fondness so potent it makes both of them freeze, for just a moment, before Colin leans close and drops his head onto Che’s shoulder.

Later in the night, after they’ve fallen into bed and Che has curled into his side for warmth, Colin’s mind runs again over the contours of last Saturday night. Something like fear swirls inside him at the idea of Che’s sitcom proposal—the mere thought of leaving SNL always sends a bolt of adrenaline through him that leaves him feeling vaguely ill. He knows, of course, why he’s so opposed to leaving. SNL was his first job out of college, and while he’s on it he can exist in an endless adolescence. Life lived casually, on a week to week basis, commitments impossible because of the demands of the job. A personal life made easy because of the difficulty all around them. 

He thinks about what Che is asking him to do, and the trust that must require. Leave the old routine behind and embark on something new, something founded entirely by the two of them. There’s beauty in that—even inside his fear, he knows that. Maybe he could come around to the idea, given some time. 

And fuck, if it doesn’t work out, there’s always pro wrestling, he thinks. Or the FDNY, a fact which his mom is still fond of reminding him of. 

But time is the key. Time to get used to the idea, time to understand the magnitude of it all, time to look Michael in the eye and comprehend all that he feels when he does so.

 

 

Che spends the minutes before the Wednesday read-through constructing an elaborate sandwich from the materials provided by the craft table while somewhere behind him writers and cast members and department heads pile into seats. When he turns around to face the room, sandwich already traversing through space toward his mouth, he finds only one pair of eyes focused on him: Pete Davidson, his expression strangely unreadable. Che nods to him, and Pete looks away.

Afterwards, once the room has been loosened by laughter and the meeting begins to break up, Che watches Pete leave. Watches Mulaney walk with him, clap a hand on his shoulder, their eyes darting in the direction of where Colin is going over notes with Lorne on the other side of the room. Michael watches and thinks, maybe, that he understands something new.

 

 

Pete lingers around the dressing room while John experiments with monologue ideas for the rest of the afternoon, but John can tell that the other man is distracted. Eventually, Pete lights up a joint and watches dazedly while John words and re-words the Woody Allen/Petunia bit until it begins to flow. 

“Do you mind?” Mulaney says, finally, waving at the cloud of smoke filling the room. Something itches inside of him. His past substance abuse never feels far away when he’s with Pete, and he likes that danger, sometimes. Today, though, the old urge just feels like a nuisance.

“Oh. Sorry,” Pete quickly drops the joint in a half empty coke can, but then sees John’s pained expression and decides to take the extra step and throw the can in the recycling bin down the hall. In his absence, Mulaney cracks a window and takes a few long breaths of outside air, until his head clears and he feels less like the ghost of his younger self, and by the time Pete returns the room has begun to feel less crowded with memory.

“I think you should cut the siren bit,” Pete says, settling back into a crevice of the couch.

“But I like it,” John replies, feigning offense. 

Pete just smirks. “You’re just using it as an excuse to show off your mouth skills.”

They look at each other for a moment before John breaks into laughter and Pete begins to flail.

“Okay, okay, that came out wrong, but you know what I mean,” Pete says, around a giggle. 

There’s a rap on the doorframe and Colin appears, a pen behind each ear. “Do you have a time estimate for your monologue yet?”

“Uh...it’s like eleven minutes, at the moment.”

“Can you get it down to nine for dress?”

John just smiles knowingly. “What choice do I have?”

“You always have a choice,” Colin says. “Cut it down or Lorne eats your first born child.”

“Son or daughter?” asks Pete.

Colin winks at him. “Either. He doesn’t discriminate.”

Then he’s marching out the door, and John watches Pete watch him go.

 

 

 

Che wakes up at some point on Wednesday night in a cold sweat, alone. Colin has not come home with him; he’d been in the midst of a rewrite when Michael had decided to call it quits on the night. Maybe, he thinks, if Colin were next to him, than his mind wouldn’t race so fluently toward the conclusion that it does.

Regardless, the thoughts come unabated. It hits him solidly; the punch finally lands. He knows what he has to do.

 

 

On Thursday morning, Colin arrives in the writers room to find Kyle and Beck playing a version of Marco Polo with a blindfold and a golf club. Colin takes one look at the situation and walks right back out of the room, ducking into Che’s waiting office.

“You’ve gotta let me hide out in here,” he says, when Che looks up at him. “Kyle and Beck are being unbearable.”

“No problem.” 

Colin slumps onto the couch in the corner and notices, abruptly, that Michael has his feet up on his desk and is pouring himself a drink from the whiskey bottle he usually keeps stashed on the top shelf of his book case. “What’s the occasion?”

Michael takes a long sip of his drink, pauses, then looks him dead in the eye. “I just turned in my resignation.”

Colin blinks. “What?” he croaks.

Che doesn’t falter. “Are you with me?”

“Right now?” Colin suddenly finds himself on his feet. “You’re doing the show this week, right? And finishing the season out?”

Che shakes his head calmly, unmoving. “I need to go now. They want a pilot in production by next week. There’s no time to do both.”

“You’re leaving me?” His voice is taking on a tone that he knows will embarrass him later, but for now he can hardly manage to force out the words at all. “Just like that?”

Now, Michael is getting to his feet as well. “I’m asking you to come with me.”

They stare at each other for a moment, the air charged and heavy. Finally, Colin sucks in a breath, and shakes his head. “Che, I—”

Michael is watching him, eyes unyielding.

“Che, you know I can’t,” Colins forces out. “Not like this. Not now.”

“If not now, then when?”

Colin can’t formulate an answer. He shrugs, looking at the floor.

“Did you really think you’d stay here forever?” Michael asks, rounding his desk. “Did you really think I would?”

And, again, Colin can’t reply. Because the truth of it is, on some level, that that’s exactly what he’d thought. He’s even fantasized, occasionally, of one day replacing Lorne—and, on a good day, it almost seems like Lorne agrees. And inside that fantasy, he’s always assumed Che would be beside him, because that’s how easily Colin has associated Che with the rest of his life. There’s a selfishness in that assumption, he knows, so the thought embeds itself somewhere in his guts and refuses to come to his lips.

“Che,” is all he gets out, and meets his eyes desperately.

“It’s okay,” Che is saying, nodding to himself. Moving toward the door. “I understand.”

“Che, please.” Colin lurches forward to follow him.

“I get it,” he says, looking away.

“ _Michael._ ” 

But Che doesn’t look back. He’s out of the door, and then Colin is standing in the empty office, the air vibrating around him.

 

 

Pete has yet to hear of Che’s departure when he steps out onto the back stairwell to light up. So when Michael appears on the landing with a box full of stuff that once decorated his office, Pete raises both eyebrows.

“Did you get fired or did the show finally get cancelled?” Pete asks, as Che trots down toward him and reaches a hand out to take a puff of the joint.

“Neither,” he replies. “I just quit.”

Pete looks at him for a long moment, trying to discern if there’s a joke in all this that he’s missing. “Oh?”

“Yep.”

“Huh.” Pete takes back the joint and takes a long drag.

Che moves around him, toward the next descending flight of stairs. “If you see Colin, will you tell him—”

Pete must look at him too intently, because Che breaks off with a frown.

“Actually, don’t tell him anything.” The soles of Che’s sneakers echo up the stairwell. Pete keeps listening long after they’ve faded into nothing.

 

 

Once he’s home Michael puts on a second hoodie, more for comfort than for warmth. Then he pours himself drink, orders a salad, and wonders whether he’s just ruined his life. 

This is not the first time he’s asked himself this question. That old urge to self-sabotage has followed him for thirty years. He’s always been drawn to hardship; it’s what he knows best. He’d quit in the middle of the week so he wouldn’t have the chance to lose his nerve during prolonged goodbyes. It had seemed like the easier path, when he first conceived it, but now it just seems like a refusal to acknowledge the ties that bind him to SNL. One tie in particular.

But Colin is irrelevant now, he reminds himself. He made his choice; in truth, it’s the choice Che expected him to make. Each of them committed to their own form of noncommitment.

He pulls his hood up around his ears, reaches for his laptop and the document with the pilot script, and gets to work editing. 

 

 

On Friday, Colin wanders through the studio in a haze, disconnected from the chaos around him. Then, in the evening, he’s called into a frantic meeting with Lorne and the department heads. An intern has lost the drives with the footage for all the digital shorts this week. There’s no time to reshoot. If the footage can’t be located, they’ll have to fill the gaps with live material—they’ll have to reuse existing sets, costumes, whatever they can to make the logistics possible. Slowly, the magnitude of the crisis dawns on Colin as the words sink in to the room.

“Did we cut anything digital last week?” he asks, feeling the haze lift. A crisis has always been able to sharpen him like nothing else. He was born to do this.

“Yeah, but we put one of them on Youtube. We’re still gonna be seven minutes short,” says the nearest producer with a clipboard in front of her.

“Okay, I can work with that,” Colin replies, already cataloguing this week’s rejected sketches. “We’ll put in the Nestle sketch. I’ll see what we can add to some of the others and get updated runtimes. We’re going to have to do some reshuffling?”

With that, the room plunges into technicalities and Colin, for a moment at least, can allow himself to slip blissfully into it. He spends most of the rest of the night caught up in the mess, but when he does catch a few hours of sleep in the morning it ends up being only barely worth it. He dreams elaborately and horrifically: the cue cards transform into another language, he starts sneezing as the intro plays and can’t stop, the studio morphs into a dark, confusing maze when he tries to take his place for Update. In all of them, Che is nowhere to be found.

Eventually, he gives up on sleep. He slurps water from the tap in the bathroom, stares at himself in the mirror, bites down hard on the inside of his cheek. And then he gets back to work.

 

 

John cannot help but wonder if there’s some meeting or memo he’s missed where everyone agreed not to mention Che’s abrupt absence. It seems like it should be more of a scandal than it is, but if Lorne’s given the okay on the sitcom then perhaps they all have to pretend like this is normal procedure. Michael has always done things his own way; he supposes Lorne has no choice but to make it seem like this is all according to plan. 

Regardless, he’s afraid even to look Colin in the eye, because there’s something new and volatile about him. By the time Saturday morning rolls around, as the crew and the writers rush to fill in the gaps left by the missing digital shorts, John watches Colin stare blankly at it all from the balcony seats above. John climbs the stairs toward him, uncertain what words there are to say once he arrives. 

Colin hardly reacts when he sits down beside him. He looks dead ahead at the movement on set, jaw flexing intermittently. 

“Are you alright?” John asks, regretting it instantly.

“Do you think we can add a verse to Bodega Bathroom?” Colin asks, without looking at him. “We need to fill the time.”

“Um, yeah,” John says, nodding uncertainly. “I’ll see what I can think of.”

There’s a long silence. Colin looks twitchy, somehow—or maybe he’s just blinking too much. John tries again. “Do you need anything?”

Colin pauses, inclining his head just slightly in thought. “I need a good show.”

John just sighs. “I’ll do my best.”

From somewhere below them there arises an abrupt cheer that spreads like a wave through the present cast and crew. The digital short footage has been located, finally—there might be just enough time to get it edited before tonight. The show order will have to be reshuffled yet again, the scripts all cut down again to original length, and then maybe cut down again between dress and live. The two of them are drawn back into the fray, and any remaining words are lost.

 

 

Once the digital short footage is edited in record time, the night begins to fall into its regular rhythm. Colin waits to feel satisfied by this, energized by the quick save and his approaching moment in the sun. Waits for the words _and live from New York, it’s Saturday night!_ to send their usual jolt through him. But nothing comes. It’s only emptiness that reverberates inside him, multiplying itself via its own echo in his chest. The old rituals feel distant and meaningless. 

But there’s no time to interrogate this further—he’s pulled into a final rehearsal in his day old t-shirt and sloppy hair, then rushed off to get made up before dress. Once in front of the audience, he manages to go through the motions. The emptiness on the left side of the desk harmonizes easily with the emptiness in his chest, now working its way up his throat. 

He stumbles off the stage after dress, the studio a blur around him. He feels distantly nauseous, his body not quite his own. Pete, dressed as Michael Avenatti, is standing just backstage. The meet eyes. Colin keeps walking.

 

 

Che makes a valiant effort to not watch the show—a little distance feels like it might be cleansing. He spends a long time picking out an outfit to go drink in, but he doesn’t make it very far into his first drink at the bar around the corner before he starts to feel antsy. He’s back in his apartment and in front of the TV by midnight, just as the Update theme plays. _With Colin Jost and Michael Che._ There had been no time to change the intro.

And now the camera is panning down on Colin, looking unbalanced as he scoots toward the center of the desk to fill the gap. Is there something strange in his eyes? Che leans closer to the TV, searching, but the pixels obfuscate any truth to be found.

“Welcome to Weekend Update, I’m Colin Jost,” he says, with the usual flick of his pencil, as the audience cheers. And then he pauses, just one beat—the one where Che would usually offer his own name. A reasonable mistake, Michael thinks. 

But then the beat elongates. 

Colin looks blankly into the camera, lips parted but silent. The audience giggles nervously, then devolves into whispers, then the studio audio cuts out entirely. And Colin doesn’t move, doesn’t speak. Just stares straight ahead. Che leans further forward on his couch, pulled in by the gaze.

Time slows. 

Something in his chest loosens and begins to fall. Che knows that he’s looking at a screen and Colin is looking at a camera and cue cards and likely a sea of panicking crew members but, for a second, all of that falls away. They're just looking at each other, and no one else. 

Then Colin puts down his pencil, rises from his desk, and walks off. The show abruptly cuts to commercial. 

Che sits unmoving for several long minutes, then reaches to turn off the TV. In the quiet, he can feel his cells vibrate. The world has tilted back into place. He stands, then drifts out of his apartment and into the cold night.

When Colin arrives half an hour later, materializing from the surrounding darkness, Che is on the front stoop waiting for him, the smile already forming on his lips.

“What did I just do?” Colin asks, standing at the bottom of the stairs. He looks shell-shocked but still dapper in his Update suit. Che imagines him trundling downtown a few minutes before on the empty midnight F train, alone and impeccable.

Che gets to his feet and trots down the stairs to cup Colin’s face in his palms. Their eyes meet. “You took a leap of faith.”

When they kiss, he feels Colin’s hands come up and ball into the back of his hoodie, as though it’s the only thing anchoring them both. Their lips press together, then Che pulls back and kisses him on the forehead, pushes his nose into his hair. They sway on the night sidewalk, the streetlight above them still burdened with the same day old snow that crunches beneath their feet. 

“Are you with me?” Che asks again. He needs to hear the answer. Needs to feel it on a molecular level. They sit down on the bottom step, hands intertwined, shoulders hovering close. The cold burns his lungs, begins to slow his racing heart. 

“I’m with you,” Colin breathes, deflating further into Che. “Always with you.”

 

 

After what remains of the show, there seems to be a consensus that no afterparty is necessary. Still, no one seems ready to go home—writers and cast and crew members are left milling around the studio, speaking in hushed voices as if the events of the night are a salacious secret, and not something that’s just been broadcast across the nation. The adrenaline from the scramble to fill time in Update’s absence has worn off and in its place is left only shock.

John, at some point, ends up next to Kate, both of them sipping from solo cups for the sake of having something to do with their hands.

“Was it as weird a week for you as it was for me?” he asks.

Kate squints at him. “Did you see this coming?”

He shrugs. 

Kate makes one of her faces and slinks off again. 

Eventually, the studio begins to clear out. By morning, only the cleaning staff remain. And Pete, who has taken a seat on the lip of the main stage and brazenly lit up a cigarette. John crosses the room to join him. 

“So,” says Pete, trailing off as they meet eyes.

“So,” says John. 

“Now what?” asks Pete. For the first time, John sees the youth in him. The vulnerability of it, peeking through beneath the skin. The hurt at being left behind. And again, he doesn’t know what to say. 

So, instead, he leans over and pulls Pete into a hug and knows, finally, that it’s probably all anyone can ever do.

**Author's Note:**

> lafayette1777.tumblr.com


End file.
